The only good news is - so many other advertisers have had their accounts closed that our ROI has gone up.
if cpc is your main driving force learn it inside and out.
Inside an out is more then selecting keywords and starting an adgroup, if you can not identify which EXACT words and which AD bring you sales and which words do not, LEARN, or you continue to waste ad spend on non converting low CTR keywords and blame affilates for your high cost while your bottom end suffers.
/rant :-)
not saying you don't know what you are doing but alot of people just think CPC is saying..oh i sell "widgets" so i'll just bid on "widgets" then they find out that word costs 1.25 per click and flip
if cpc is your main driving force learn it inside and out.
PPC is only about 10% of our traffic. We do know it inside and out. The problem is when there is 10 of us bidding on a keyword and 7 of them are affiliates.
You really can never 100% know WHAT keyword the other person is bidding on. Everyone would be in a lot of trouble if it was that easy.
There are mainly two types of affiliates:You are just like Google by not seeing (or ignoring) the fact that there is a huge difference between those two types of affiliates.
1. Affiliates who are making fake review sites and/or sites with copy paste content.2. Affiliates who are promoting the merchants website using direct linking. (so the link of the merchant is in the ad). Those affiliates don't use their own website(s). You should see such an affiliate as an agency that handles the adwords campaigns for a merchant.
I don't wish a ban for anyone accept for the ones that are breaking the rules over and over again. But I must admit that it would be hilarious when someone like you gets a ban overnight. And don't think this will not happen to you. Also a lot of people that don't do affiliate marketing got banned. All for the greater good.
It doesn't matter if Affiliate marketing is good, bad, or indifferent, because Google has made up their mind. I dunno how they expect people to sell via the Google Affiliate Network which seems to be gaining new advertisers every day, but that's their worry, not mine.
For what it's worth, none of my clients are frozen, none of them even know about any of this. We're carrying on as usual, raising and lowering budgets as ROI dictates.
Rugles, we did see a drop in our costs which was odd as I seriously thought that we were only competing with Google for CPC. The imposed minimum was so high that i thought that was our floor pretty much everywhere. Nice to see that had changed.
The direct linking is never going to go over with AdWords because Google doesn't want eight or ten ads on a page all going to the same landing page.
Any affiliate making a decent living will be linking to thousands of deep landing pages per merchant. Therefore reducing the chance of multiple adds pointing to the same L/P. Plus, as you know, Gorg will not allow repeat destination url's
Most merchants don't have the time, knowledge or inclination to run PPC campaigns with thousands of destination urls
This leaves them with two choices
1) Hire a PPC company/expert
2) Seek affiliate services
1 is usually a fixed cost even when making a loss
2 is always performance related = no profit - no cost
Much of the worlds business is conducted on performance related payments. Gorg has built a multi billion dollar income rewarding performance, via the QS system.
Get over it.
Why so nasty?
LEAVE GOOGLE, YOU CAN FIND TRAFFIC AND $$$ in the others AND THE TRAFFIC IS MUCH MUCH CHEAPER!
i looked at the google afflite and it seems they are only going to let people they approve play in their playground with affliate products they approve to be there.
next stop... organic SERPs!
Anyway the problem with adWords is the lack of clarity between low QS and a potential BAN.
Does low QS mean = Ban is coming..
Does overnight Low QS mean = Google policies have chaged ( with retrospective effect , maybe)
Does low QS mean = The business is no more ' liked ' by the gorg.
Does Low QS mean = Watch out.. here we come for you..
What the heck does low QS overnight signify ?
Esp. for campains running for the last 3 years..
Hey Dear Google.. Can you let us know..We will be grateful for the measely scrap of info.
and don't send us to an old link on the adWords help pages..which may or may not be even relevant as guidelines given to human reviewers (if any) seem to change regulary..
The direct linking is never going to go over with AdWords because Google doesn't want eight or ten ads on a page all going to the same landing page. Period. Get over it.
Not sure what does this mean... Multiple ads going to the same landing page were "fixed" back in Spring 2005, when the one display URL per query policy was introduced.
For Google, there is nothing wrong with affiliates doing direct linking.
I believe that particular affiliates that got screwed and banned were those that promoted stuff that Google did not like.
I also believe that as long as affiliates stick with well known networks - they have a low chance to get punished because merchant has been disliked by Google AdWords.
Plus, open eyes and figure out if merchant is iffy (like various information aggregation sites).
Finally, it is up to a merchant to regulate if affiliates are allowed to direct link or not. There are some challenges with particular (bad) guys - many of them have been slammed already by Google which brings me back to the belief that AdWords has actually implemented some kind of behavioral based action. Not sure if it worked well. We know there seemed to be some unnecessary casualties.
After time, and after researching (and trying) some products, I chose to affiliate with some manufacturers.
About one year ago I thought to delve in Adwords. I setup my account for this website, and set it to go.
I got a QS of 1/10. What was strange, was that the pages were informational, ie not a redirect to a product website, or anything like that.
An interesting coincidence happened just after this. A Google Adwords rep called me about another project I manage for a client. This person wanted us to sign up and advertise via Adwords (which we didn't in the end)
I mentioned my issues and problems advertising in Adwords with my other affiliate website. The rep looked into it, got back tome, and said 'check the account'
The QS had been set to 7's across the board. When the data took, they leveled at 6-9's.
For the life of me, I have no idea how the rules are applied to accounts. And it is painfully obvious that there are always exceptions to every rule...
Is anyone else experiencing this? We are afraid to do anything. We are not adding ads. We are not taking advantage of the new stuff google is offering. We just delete ads as they drop in QS. We are paralyzed and slowly dieing.
Our situation exactly. I don't see it changing either unless advertisers who were incorrectly banned are readmitted into the program - and incorrect bans stop permanently.
BTW - How do the comparison/information sites that pollute the sponsored links, and don't even have the product still exists in Adwords. You know the kind that bulk bid volume KWs, but if you click the link you get a "sorry no matches found" but check all the other stuff we have.
Rugles: Perhaps you should consider some "affiliates" as commision sales people who have expertise in areas that you may not. Not only the big 3(GYM) PPC, but knowledge about all the other PPC SEs, bulk traffic, spot buys, vertical markets, IPSP processors, etc.
Currently working on setting up for two very small niche companies(< 30 people). They do not have the knowledge, or the money to try to get(SEO) to the top SERPs(5,000,000 results). An affiliate doing SEM for sommissions can greatly increase their business.
Nearly all my ads started out good, but now nearly all of them have low quality scores, and it seems there’s nothing I'm doing is correcting this. As far as I'm concerned quality and relevancy couldnt be any better, but adwords disagrees. Too frightened to contact Google as they usually make things worse. It is too much hard work, so I've paused most of them. In most cases, the website sales itself, doesn’t need adwords approval.
Maybe should also start another thread:
Google users too afraid to talk to Google support.
1. Affiliates who are making fake review sites and/or sites with copy paste content.2. Affiliates who are promoting the merchants website using direct linking. (so the link of the merchant is in the ad). Those affiliates don't use their own website(s). You should see such an affiliate as an agency that handles the adwords campaigns for a merchant.
This is total nonsense.
This is total nonsense.Why?
The direct linking is never going to go over with AdWords because Google doesn't want eight or ten ads on a page all going to the same landing page. Period. Get over it.
Actually Google fixed that problem a long time ago with the one destination url per ad policy.
There seems to be a misconception in this and other threads that all affiliates are created equal so Google is/should be/will be out to get all affiliates.
Direct linking affiliates are no different that in-house SEM teams or agencies as far as the effects of their work are concerned - their contract with the merchant is just different as far as compensation, contract terms, etc is concerned.
They're a totally different animal than those affiliates who place ads for low quality landing pages stuffed with affiliate ads - those are the ones who add little or nothing to the user experience.
(Google by the way runs a major affiliate network - Google Affiliate Network, formerly Performics. I would have thought that that fact alone would have given people a clue that it isn't prey to some uneducated view that the affiliate business is all evil, period. I find it amusing that this view persists notwithstanding. All these threads eventually seem to degenerate into some uninformed posters coming in and saying "Google doesn't like affiliates so get over it" or something to that effect.)
- Saxman
Fly-by-night businesses are probably resting easier than those of use with employees, offices and other fixed expenses. Is that really what Google wants?
<snip>
[edited by: buckworks at 5:41 pm (utc) on Dec. 30, 2009]
[edit reason] No URL drops please; see TOS [/edit]
